Page - 257 - in Der Arkadenhof der Universität Wien und die Tradition der Gelehrtenmemoria in Europa

PAPER MONUMENTS FOR ANTIQUARIES (CAYLUS, WINCKELMANN, D’HANCARVILLE): METAHISTORICAL INTERVENTIONS Hans Christian Hönes One of the central aims of the present vol-ume is to contribute to the history of schol- ars’ monuments in halls of honour and panthe- ons, such as the Viennese Arkadenhof, and to work towards a typology of these spaces of re- membrance. Such collective commemorative spaces necessarily extend beyond the individual to a more corporative form of remembrance, no matter how closely the iconography of a monu- ment might allude to the profession and achieve- ments of an individual (as in the case of Theodor Billroth, analysed by Julia Rüdiger). In order to contribute to a contrastive analysis of these en- sembles, I would like to focus on a somewhat different constellation, namely on paper monu- ments that were integrated in the published works of the author they were dedicated to. The monument, in this case, becomes a paratext to the scholarly output of the honoured person. My article will focus on three such cases: me- morials for the Comte de Caylus, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, and Pierre-François d’Hancarville, all three of whom are amongst the most famous antiquaries of the second half of the eighteenth century. This shared profession (or research inter- est, at least) leads to another quite intricate speci- ficity of these examples: they represent memorials of a historiographer in a work on historiography. Two levels of historical interest and enquiry meet here: the description of the past (as pursued by the historian) and the shaping of the past (as done by the commissioner/designer of a paper memor- ial – who might readily be synonymous with the former). I wish to argue that in these cases, paper monuments become a metahistorical commen- tary on the respective author’s writings and theor- ies of history. By shaping the remembrance of the historiographer, these monuments relate the latter to the past he describes. The fact that these monu- ments were designed, on more than one occasion, by the antiquary himself, gives rise to a self-reflex- ive comment on the epistemological status of the narrative representation of history and the histori- ographer’s own status. i The Comte de Caylus (1692–1765), one of the most prominent, renowned, colourful, and ver- satile amateurs of his day, is known first and fore- most for his enormous seven-volume history of ancient art, the Recueil des antiquités égyptiennes, étrusques, grecques, romaines et gauloises (1752– 67).1 In the seventh and last volume of his mag- num opus (published only posthumously, two 1 The range of his activities was, however, extremely vast and went far beyond the realm of antiquarian research. On